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When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exploded onto the scene last June with a New York primary victory over Rep. Joe Crowley, chair of the House Democratic caucus, many in the media wondered why they’d failed to see her coming. While left-leaning outlets such as The Intercept, Splinter, and The Young Turks had paid attention to Ocasio-Cortez’s longshot bid, more mainstream publications had overlooked both her campaign and the radically progressive platform it touted. “Abolish ICE” and “Medicare for all” quickly entered the lexicon of the political press.
Seven months later, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez fills column inches as a disrupter in Washington. In addition to her agenda, plenty of ink has spilled on her social media game: prominent media and tech writers have lined up recently to hail it as a mini-revolution in political communication. Where Trump, is “online,” Ocasio-Cortez is “Extremely Online,” Kara Swisher writes in her New York Times column. Ocasio-Cortez’s #relatable video content humanizes her, Swisher adds, whereas Trump’s disembodied tweets make him look “more and more like a giant cartoon bobblehead.”

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Is there anything we know now that we didn’t know, say, a month ago? Or a year ago? Or two years ago?

The Bob Woodward book has some astounding details — including evidenceof outright insubordination by senior officials — but in its essence, it’s just a much more reliable confirmation of the basic thrust of Michael Wolff’s picture of complete chaos and near-insanity in the cockpit of the world’s most powerful nation. The New York Times’ anonymous op-ed falls into the same camp. From the moment very early on when we learned about the content of the deranged conversation between the president and Malcolm Turnbull, then prime minister of Australia, we knew that people in the White House had leaked it, in both an astonishing betrayal of confidence, and a clear attempt to warn the country of the unique danger this unfit president poses. Almost all the excellent reporting of the last year and a half has also been fed by constant distress signals from within the White House, where grown-ups have had to contend with a psychologically disturbed, delusional, and hugely ignorant president, who has no capacity or willingness to learn.

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Unlike several other allies of the United States, Turkey has praised President Trump’s decision to withdraw 2,000 of his ground forces from Syria, a country where it will now have a freer rein to target Kurdish fighters.

On Monday Ankara sent more troops to its Syrian border and said an offensive targeting the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia and IS group will be launched in the coming months.

Turkey views the YPG as a “terrorist offshoot” of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984.